AVIATION Biography –

“While most Latin Americans and almost any Brazilian will emphatically declare that Alberto Santos-Dumont rather than the Wright Brothers was first to fly, RAF officer Wykeham’s book is the first description of this aeronautical pioneer’s work to appear in an English-language book since the 1904 translation of a brief autobiography. The book fails to fill entirely this great gap, but fortunately Brazilian volumes contain factual information that nicely complement its main themes.

Santos-Dumont is studied as a personality as well as an aviator. The author acknowledges advice from several authorities on his subject’s mental make-up, a condition aptly capsulized in the sub-title of the book. Santos-Dumont’s suicide, which actually stopped fighting briefly in the 1932 uprising against Vargas, was caused by his emotional distress over the warfare uses of “his invention,” as well as by an increasingly severe medical state, diagnosed by the author and his medical authorities as sclerosis. The book is original in its analyses along these significant lines.

This book is also important in its attempt to fit Santos-Dumont into his just niche as an aeronautical pioneer. It attempts to strike a balance between the exalted image, with unfavorable shadows ignored, put forth in Brazil, and the unfortunate lack of recognition in this country for a man who indisputably did more than the Wrights to inspire by example the development of aviation. Santos-Dumont achieved considerable success with controlled lighter-than-air designs before his first true aeroplane flight, in France, late in 1906.

A helpful appendix lists and describes the aerial vehicles designed by Alberto Santos-Dumont. For photographic and contemporary journalistic coverage of Santos-Dumont’s achievements, the Brazilian works on the aviator are better. These are referred to occasionally in sporadic footnotes that enlighten very slightly. Overall, however, this book is valuable indeed in meeting a great need for a study of an eccentric Brazilian who remains one of the great heroes of his country.”

First Edition.

• 278 p., [17] p. of plates : ill., facsim., ports. ; 23 cm. #240525 (faint prev ownership stamp.)

• • Santos-Dumont, Alberto, 1873-1932
  • Aeronautics — Brazil — Biography